FSE TABLET, February 2ith, 19«

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

VOL. 197, No. 5779

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

LONDON, FEBRUARY 24th, 1951

SIXPENCE

FOUNDED IN 1840

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

WHAT REMAINS? The Crumbling Foundations o f British Socialism ON THE DANGERS OF CREDULOUSNESS

By Mgr. Alfredo Ottaviani, Assessor o f the Holy Office

THE IRONIC MASK The Death o f André Gide. By François Mauriac

A LETTER FROM WALES

For S t . David’s Day. By H . W . J . Edwards

A CONGEALED MYTH

[The Testimony o f a Spanish Socialist

THE TWO HUMANISMS Newman’s View o f Education. By A . C. F . Beales

THF PRICE OF REARMAMENT T HE high cost o f living presses hardly upon everyone, and the better-off whom it does not drive anywhere near the margins o f privation have nevertheless experienced, relatively to the majority, a far greater change for the worse in all the setting in which their lives are lived, a much more radical abandonment o f things that were taken for granted in upper and middle class life before 1939. There is in consequence a widespread fellow-feeling throughout the country ; and it is highly necessary, because otherwise, as there comes to be less to divide, men are inclined to struggle more fiercely for it.

It is probably true to say that the general attitude o f the public towards the wage demands o f the railwaymen is a sympathetic one, with the sympathy only tempered by an acute awareness that passenger travel is becoming a luxury to be rarely indulged in, that the road, and even the lorry, figure more and more in people’s calculations. Any increase in the cost of moving goods will soon reflect itself over the whole field of prices, since some material that has to be moved enters into the cost of every article. For a great many things the cost is cumulative, beginning with the coal, the raw materials that come into the country from outside, and those that have to be assembled a t a point of final production here. It was undoubtedly the belief of many Socialists in the past that the standard of living could be increased if the things that enter the costs o f all industries were provided as cheaply as possible— above all, cheap coal and cheap transport. But it is not proving at all easy for the State to provide either.

make little call on a man beyond physical presence. It ought to be a high object o f public policy to make it very much worth while for every boy to want to be highly skilled, a master o f a craft. But the general spirit o f the Labour movement has directed a concentration on the lower grades and the unskilled as having the first claim. We are now threatened with a growing disparity between the immense solemnity with which State education is conducted and the manner in which work is afterwards rewarded. There is the sifting out of anxious and burdened children, whose future is to turn on the kind o f school they go to a t eleven, and then, a t the end of'laborious school years, there is found to be very little difference in the pay and conditions obtainable by contrast with those which are guaranteed to those who, after ambling through a modern school, seek any sort of job. The question o f differentials in after life is really presupposed in all that is said about developing to the full the latent capacities o f every child, where the presupposition is that all this ability is wanted and will be appropriately rewarded. But then the whole philosophy that has inspired educational advance is the old individualist philosophy, and its appeal has been to parents who have hoped that their children would derive marked advantages from it. Nothing is Free

The British problem today is to find enough people to do all that needs to be done. Mr. Gaitskell put this very plainly last week in the Commons debate on rearmament when he said :—

A t the back of the minds of workers who vote for nationalization there has been the idea that a State Board could never prove th a t the industry could not afford to pay more, because the Unions could always answer : “No, but the country can.” There has also been the idea that State employment gives more security ; and this explains the indignation with which the railwaymen’s leaders, echoing the rank-and-file, have reacted to the Railway Executive’s attempt to link any advance in pay with rearrangements o f the work that would enable the total numbers to be reduced. The railwaymen have now agreed to discuss this, and it is fundamental : it ought to be one o f the advantages to be derived from the combination o f the conditions o f full employment with elaborate social services, that there should be more mobility, and, as Mr. Morrison said, the loss of a job should be seen in its proper light as involving a change o f occupation, not as redundancy and unemployment.

One o f the troubles, not only in the railway world, is that there tends all the time to be less difference in pay, after deduction o f tax, between the highly skilled and the unskilled worker ; between occupations, o f which some are extremely exacting, full of responsibility and strain, while others may

“Here and there it should be possible to increase the labour force in industry by reducing the unemployment figure still further ; it may be possible, too, to induce more women to go back to work in industry, and older men to stay longer a t work ; it is very likely that more overtime will have to be worked in some cases. But it is no use pretending that we can expect a very substantial increase in the national total of man-hours worked. We must rely mainly for increased production, as we have done in the last few years, and the last two years particularly, on a higher output per man5iour, higher productivity or efficiency.” The whole of Mr. Gaitskell’s speech was concerned with this problem—how we can simultaneously rearm and export and keep going all the goods and services which make possible the consumption th a t takes place inside the country. Needless to say, o f the three great categories, to cut down on rearmament is simply not to rearm, while to cut down on exports is to go without imports. It is civilian consumption a t home that must be further reduced.